Observium: A Complete Network Management and Monitoring System for RHEL/CentOS

Observium is a PHP/MySQL driven Network Observation and Monitoring application, that supports a wide range of operating systems/hardware platforms including, Linux, Windows, FreeBSD, Cisco, HP, Dell, NetApp and many more. It seeks to present a robust and simple web interface to monitor health and performance of your network.

Install Observium in CentOS/RHEL

Observium gathers data from devices with the help of SNMP and display those data in graphical pattern via a web interface. It makes hefty use of the RRDtool package. It has a number of thin core design goals, which includes collecting as much historical information about devices, being totally auto-discovered with slight or no manual interruption, and having a very simple yet powerful interface.

Observium Demo

Please have a quick online demo of the Observium deployed by the developer at the following location.

This article will guide you on how to install Observium on RHEL, CentOS and Scientific Linux, the supported version is EL (Enterprise Linux)6.x. Currently, Observium unsupported for EL release 4 and 5 respectively. So, please don’t use following instructions on these releases.

Step 1: Adding RPM Forge and EPEL Repositories

RPMForge and EPEL is a repository that provides many add-on rpm software packages for RHEL, CentOS and Scientific Linux. Let’s install and enable these two community based repositories using the following serious of commands.

Step 3: Downloading Observium

Community/Open Source Edition: This edition is freely available for download with less features and few security fixes.

Subscription Edition: This edition is comes with additional features, rapid feature/fixes, hardware support and easy to use SVN-based release mechanism.

Firstly navigate to the /opt directly, here we will going to install Observium as default. If you wish to install somewhere else, please modify commands and configuration accordingly. We strongly suggest you to first deploy under /opt directory. Once you verify that everything works perfectly, you can install at your desired location.

If you have a active Observium subscription, you can use SVN repositories to download most recent version. A valid subscription account only valid for a single installation and two testing or development installations with daily security patches, new features and bug fixes.

To download most recent stable and current version of Observium, you need to have a svn package installed on the system, in order to pull the files from the SVN repository.

# yum install svn

Development Version

# svn co http://svn.observium.org/svn/observium/trunk observium

Stable Version

We don’t have a valid subscription, So we we are going to try out Observium using the Community/Open Source Edition. Download the latest ‘observium-community-latest.tar.gz’ stable version and unpack it as shown.

Step 5: Configure Observium

Configuring SELinux to work with Observium is beyond the scope of this article, so we disabled SELinux. If you are familiar with SELinux rules, then you can configure it, but no guarantee that the Observium work with active SELinux. So, better disable it permanently. To do, open ‘/etc/sysconfig/selinux‘ file and change the option from ‘permissive‘ to ‘disabled‘.

# vi /etc/sysconfig/selinux

SELINUX=disabled

Copy the default configuration file ‘config.php.default‘ to ‘config.php‘ and modify the settings as shown.

# /opt/observium
# cp config.php.default config.php

Now open ‘config.php‘ file and enter MySQL details such as database name, username and password.

The final step is to add httpd and mysqld services system-wide, to automatically start after system boot.

# chkconfig mysqld on
# chkconfig httpd on

Finally, open your favourite browser and point to http://Your-Ip-Address.

Observium Login Screen

Observium Dashboard

Observium Screenshot Tour

Following are the screen grabs of last mid-2013, taken from the Observium website. For up-to-date view, please check live demo.

Complete System Information

Load Average Graphs

Historical Usage Overview

CPU Frequency Monitoring

Conclusion

Observium doesn’t mean to completely remove other monitoring tools such as Nagios or Cacti, but rather to addition them with terrific understanding of certain devices. For this reason, its important to deploy Observium with Naigos or other monitoring systems to provide alerting and Cacti to produce customized graphing of your network devices.

I am Ravi Saive, creator of TecMint. A Computer Geek and Linux Guru who loves to share tricks and tips on Internet. Most Of My Servers runs on Open Source Platform called Linux. Follow Me: Twitter, Facebook and Google+

Your name can also be listed here. Got a tip? Submit it here to become an TecMint author.

Yes quite active [ http://www.librenms.org/ ] I have been using it in deployment for the last 9 months. According to the maintainers of LibreNMS they were fed up of the lack of support on the paid version.

Observium has two versions a Community version and a Professional version. The Professional version has more perks and support & services options. I have to say though, the Tecmint walk through is excellent.

Email settings in Observium:
How to configure the email settings in Observium so i am able to receive alert emails. Any one please provide steps for Observium community edition email alert configuration file( config.php).